NCRCL Research Talk – Nicola Daily, 10th October

Everyone is welcome to attend this talk:

NCRCL RESEARCH TALK

  

Developing two picturebook collections in New Zealand: The New Zealand PictureBook Collection and the NZ Pacific PictureBook Collection

 

Nicola Daly, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

Wednesday, 10th October, 16.00-17.00

 Fincham 001, Fincham Building, Digby Stuart College, University of Roehampton, London

Research shows that teachers may not choose picturebooks which represent realities that are not their own (Wolman-Bonilla, 2009), and yet the importance of all children seeing themselves and their lives being reflected in picturebooks is known and has been discussed by many in the field (e.g. Galda & Callinan, 2002). In this presentation I will describe the development of two picturebook collections whose main purpose is to ensure that New Zealand children see their own and their classmates’ realities reflected in the books being read to them. A sample of books and classroom activities from the New Zealand PictureBook Collection (NZPBC) and the New Zealand Pacific PictureBook Collection (PPBC) will be briefly introduced.

 

Nicola Daly is a senior lecturer in the Department of Arts and Language Education at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. She majored in Japanese and linguistics in her undergraduate degrees and completed her PhD in Human Communication Sciences at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia in 1998. Her current research interests lie in  the use of children’s picture books in education and language teacher education.

Melvin Burgess at Roehampton

Melvin Burgess

Back in April, Melvin Burgess came to talk to students at Roehampton about his recent homage to Dickens, Nicholas Dane, which is taught on a course called ‘Literature and Childhood’. The talk drew postgraduates and interested staff as well as undergraduates, and Melvin widened his discussion to reflect on his best-known novel Junk, as well as some of his more recent projects in places as far-flung as Congo and Twitter. He answered a lot of questions about sex, drugs, and his favourite books too…

I am editing a scholarly collection of essays on Melvin’s work for Palgrave Macmillan, so while he was down in London I also undertook a longer interview to be part of this collection. It will be published next year as part of the New Casebook series, which is being launched with a focus on children’s authors. I’m very excited that Melvin Burgess features in the second way of these Casebooks (which already profile Roald Dahl, Robert Cormier, C. S. Lewis and J. K. Rowling), and am looking forward to helping get some of his early work – such as The Cry of the Wolf and The Baby and Fly Pie – critically examined, as well as reviewing the debates about his more controversial writing.